I was working on my obituary, in case someone needed notes to be able to deliver a glowing eulogy if I suddenly dropped dead. Never know when there is that rogue bus coming around the corner. That’s not my plan, but there’s nothing wrong with being prepared. I want to make sure that whoever delivers that eulogy gets their facts straight…according to me. Maybe I’ll receive a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
As I was making the list of the many diverse jobs that I have held in my life, my time as an auto mechanic stood out to me. Yes, there was a time I was paid to work on cars. I originally applied for the job, thinking it would require sweeping the floor and unloading supplies. The auto shop offered me the job, and I said yes. It was $2.25 an hour. How could I say no? It was a dollar an hour more than my last job as a clerk/delivery boy at a drug store. Yes, they wanted me to sweep floors, but that was at the end of the day. During the day, they wanted me to work on cars. Ha, that’s a good one. I had absolutely no experience working on vehicles, besides the biannual changing of the snow tires on my dad’s station wagon. It’s impressive that the wheels didn’t fall off the car while my dad was driving.
I was surprised, but I was game to give it a try. I was given a well-pressed blue uniform with my first name in an oval above the left front pocket of the shirt. Being an auto mechanic in training may have been one of the greatest learning experiences I’ve ever had. On my first day, I realized what they wanted me to do when I was assigned to remove a transmission from a car. I would then roll the ailing transmission over to a bench. A specialized mechanic then rebuilt it. When he finished, I had to reinstall the repaired transmission and ensure the car drove out of the shop. I was fortunate that all the mechanics in the shop took me under their wings and talked me through the process. From getting the car on a lift, getting it in the air (without dropping it, and that did happen once to someone else), and step-by-step instructions on how to remove and reinstall the transmission. It went smoothly, and in a matter of a couple of weeks, I was doing the job on my own and learning plenty more. Most of the cars left the shop under their own power. That’s just a joke, or is it? Also, by the end of the day, my nicely pressed uniform was filthy, covered in grime, and soaked in fluids. Thank goodness I had a new one for each day. A service provided the uniforms. I could imagine my mom telling me that she wouldn’t put the oily rag I was wearing into our washing machine.
Part of becoming a mechanic was having my tools. I had none. My colleagues were willing to lend me what I needed until I purchased my own. The first time the Snap-On truck pulled up, I blew my first check on buying a minimal supply of tools. This is where my addiction to tools began. For years, I couldn’t walk by the Craftsman section at Sears without dropping in and buying some tool. Sears is gone, but there are places called Harbor Freight where you can buy all kinds of tools at very low prices. I can’t walk into one without walking out with a new tool. I now have a toolbox the size of a car and a tool for every need. I admit it, I am a tool addict. Just because I have so many tools doesn’t mean that I can’t buy one more…just one more and I’m done…Really, I can stop any time I want. Wait, what was that on television? A tool that removes lids from sticky jars and oil filters. I need that, then I’ll quit.
I learned a wide range of things about working on cars and appreciated every moment of my learning process. When my friends at school started talking about the work they were doing on their vehicles, I knew what they were saying. Now that I was a professional, I offered an opinion. It also meant that many of these friends expected me to crawl under their cars to fix some issue, from replacing a clutch in my brother’s car, to fixing the shifter linkage on another, and removing the drive shaft from another friend’s Mustang. It unraveled while we were driving somewhere. To solve the drive shaft issue, we went to another friend’s house, who happened to have a similar Mustang. He was not home, but we told his mom we were going to borrow something from his car. After removing our friend’s drive shaft, we headed back and installed it in the disabled vehicle. Imagine our friend’s surprise when he started his car and it wouldn’t move when he put it in gear. All of us co-conspirators still laugh about it to this day. Our victim, not so much. We did put his drive shaft back that evening. No harm, no foul…still chortling over the incident.
Once I started working as a mechanic, my dad figured he could save some money by having me do repairs on his car whenever it acted up. That included tuning it up, adjusting the valves, drying out the distributor that had been filled with water for some reason (a mystery that was never solved), and installing a trailer hitch so he could start pulling the boat he had purchased. It also included replacing the wheel bearings on the boat trailer regularly. I was happy to do all of it, or as some would say, to show off.
I was not perfect. I may have stripped a few bolts along the way, put a set of brakes on backwards, and cracked the head on an old Jeep. Minor things if you intended to take your vehicle straight to a junk yard for scrap.
There was a time when I performed brake jobs, changed my oil, performed tune-ups, replaced belts and hoses, and fine-tuned the air conditioning, but that was in the past. Once smog devices were added to the cars, my days of working on cars began to dwindle.
Today, cars are just giant computers. I still did a little work on cars, but the day I opened the hood on my hybrid SUV and saw the big sign that read “DANGER-high voltage,” I knew my days as a self-mechanic were over. I think you need to have a PHD in Electronic Engineering to work on modern cars. Too many wires, too many things to screw up. Too many ways to kill yourself.
Today’s professional mechanic can plug a device into the car, and it will tell them what needs to be replaced or fixed. Easy, right? Not so fast. There are so many layers of stuff on a car that first need to be removed, it would take a genius to get them back in the correct spot. I like doing jigsaw puzzles, and it baffles me.
The best part of working at this auto shop was being able to drive some of the most exotic cars around. I test-drove a De Tomaso Pantera, a Jaguar XKE, a classic Porsche, mid-60s Corvette, Dune Buggies, and a Studebaker Avanti, to name just a few. I also had to drive a school bus and an old 1949 Chevy pick-up truck that was the shop’s “company car.” The most fun I had was when I had to take a 1964 Ford Galaxy with a police interceptor engine for a test drive and was told to “open her up.” It was the most powerful car I have ever driven.
We didn’t have to worry about getting tickets. Our shop had an agreement with the local police that if we limited our test drives to a certain, deserted street, there would be no trouble. Now you can see why this job was fun.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the real “Car Guy” of my family. My older brother never saw a bucket of rusted bolts that he couldn’t resurrect. It started with a 1949 Chrysler, followed by a 1946 Ford, a 1958 Cadillac, and two early 1960s Corvairs, which had more rust than steel but were fun to drive. He also had a 1950 Plymouth, which he planned to restore. I think one of his sons has it now. His true love was his Model A’s. He was a member of a Model A club and owned a Model A sedan and a Model A pickup truck, which he pulled out of the mud on a farm in Wisconsin. When I got out of the Army, I shared an apartment with him and my other older brother. We shared a room, and there was no room on the nightstand or any other flat surface because it was occupied by parts for his Model A truck, which he was always tinkering with. Now, that’s a car guy.
I don’t have to worry about car repairs at the moment. My middle son is the Sales Manager at a Toyota dealership. I bought my current car there, and he ensures the vehicle is well-maintained, just as I did for my dad. Funny story about my Car Salesman son. He has no idea what goes on under the hood of the car. He would have a better chance of doing a successful brain surgery than fixing a car. Love you, son.
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